Stakes, a memoir by Noelle McCarthy

Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities of desire.

Twenty years later, exhausted by her unruly appetites, Noelle returns to Dracula, reckoning with her own history and a changing world: generation-spanning shame and trauma given voice by #MeToo and the horrors emerging from Irish soil.

More than a century after readers were first mesmerised by Dracula, Stakes transposes its electric themes of transgression, intoxication and sexual danger onto Noelle’s own life, asking: what’s the difference between an inheritance and a curse?

A funny, visceral from the acclaimed author of Grand, Stakes celebrates the power of a gothic horror to help you face the parts of life that scare you most.